by Alec Brew
All the parts of N3378 have been placed on display as a crash-site diorama, as a lasting memorial to the two men who died awaiting rescue on that lonely hillside in 1941, and of an aircraft that played its part in winning the War.
49. The re-creation of the crash-site of N3378 in the Boulton Paul Aircraft Heritage Project 2003.
CHAPTER 13
Pancake in the Black Country
The Black Country has never provided many places to land an aircraft. Before the Industrial Revolution it was an under-populated area of hills and forests; but with the discovery of coal, small industrial towns grew up, expanded, and eventually coalesced into one large conurbation in which finding a piece of greenery to make a forced landing is usually a matter of luck. In making a successful forced landing, it also helps of course if you are one of the most famous test pilots in the country, flying the aircraft with which you are most associated.
Alex Henshaw was born on 7 November 1912, and was educated at Stratford and Lincoln. He learned to fly with the Skegness and East Lincolnshire Flying Club, on a de Havilland Moth, taking his A Licence in April 1932. Later that year he acquired Moth G-AALN, and then the Comper Swift G-ACGL, which he flew in the 1933 King’s Cup Air Race. He came eighth overall and won the Siddeley Trophy, his first victory in a glittering air racing career.
The following year he raced his Leopard Moth in the King’s Cup, and the year after that his Miles M2T. It was the King’s Cup Jubilee Race that year and the first day took the competitors north from Hatfield to Renfrew in Scotland, and then back south and across the sea to Belfast. It was quite unusual for Northern Ireland to be included in the route, which meant the second day began with the long crossing of the Irish Sea, to England, into Wales and then back to Hatfield.
Unfortunately, Henshaw was forced to ditch his newly purchased aircraft in the Irish Sea. His Miles M2T, G-ADNJ, Racing Number ‘24’, was one of two specially built for the race. It was a single-seat low-wing monoplane based on the Miles Hawk, powered by a special 150 hp Cirrus Major R engine. He was skimming the waves only 10 feet up off Malin Head, when suddenly the engine stopped. His choices were singular. He stood up in his seat and stalled the aircraft when its flying speed had drained away. When the Miles hit the waves he was catapulted forward into the water.
The wooden monoplane remained intact and remained afloat, so Henshaw was able to swim back to it and climb aboard. Luckily, Jim Melrose in his Percival Gull saw the accident, and destroyed his own chances of winning the race by attracting the attention of the Isle of Man steamer to come and rescue his unfortunate rival. A boat was lowered and Henshaw was rescued. His first forced/crash-landing had ended in almost immediate rescue.
On 30 December later that year Henshaw had another close call when he was forced to bale out of his Arrow Active, G-ABIX, over Lincolnshire, as it was on fire. In 1936 he flew his Leopard Moth to victory in the London to Isle of Man Race, but when he entered it in the King’s Cup his race once more ended in a forced landing, when low oil pressure caused him to put down at Brockworth.
In 1937 he acquired the aircraft with which he will always be associated, apart from the Spitfire, Percival Mew Gull G-AEXF. He raced it in the 1937 King’s Cup, but was unplaced, with a misfiring engine. For the 1938 race a new de Havilland Gipsy Six R engine was installed in the aircraft by Essex Aero, and Henshaw duly won the King’s Cup at the record speed of 236 mph.
He then decided to make an attempt on the London to Cape Town record, and turned the aircraft back over to Essex Aero, to be prepared for the flight. Meanwhile, he and his father surveyed the West Coast route he intended to take, flying his new Percival Vega Gull, and making arrangements for fuel and oil to be ready at each of the airfields he planned to use. His meticulous preparations paid off and he broke the record with an astonishing time of 1 day 15 hours 25 minutes, and then returned in only 11 minutes more to break the return flight record as well. He still holds these records, to this day. The achievement brought him the award of the Britannia Trophy for the year 1938.
His achievements brought him to the attention of Jeffrey Quill, chief test pilot of Vickers Supermarine, who offered him a job testing the Spitfires that were beginning to roll off the production lines in ever increasing numbers. In June 1940 the first Spitfires were produced at the huge shadow factory built at Castle Bromwich, run initially by Austin Motors, but later taken over by Supermarine. Alex Henshaw went there as chief test pilot. During the War he personally flew 10 per cent of the 22,000 Spitfires built. The law of averages meant that some of those flights did not go according to plan.
On 18 July 1942 Henshaw flew a Spitfire Mk V, EP615, from Castle Bromwich to RAF Cosford,where there was a small Spitfire assembly plant based in some Bellman hangars on the edge of the airfield by the railway station. He had to test-fly another Spitfire Mk V, EP510, which had just been assembled at Cosford. As he came in to land at RAF Cosford he felt the starboard wing stall at 5 or 6 mph higher speed than it should have, and put this down to the camera door not being fastened and sealed properly. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell the mechanics to do this while he was testing EP510.
Thus, when he took off again in EP615 about an hour later the aircraft was in the same condition, not in itself dangerous, but to have serious consequences in a few minutes’ time. There was complete cloud coverage at about 800 feet, and he decided to make the short 23-mile flight below the clouds. It was his last flight of the day and a few minutes later he was cruising over the edges of the Black Country, in the area of Willenhall, about halfway home.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning the Merlin engine stopped dead. The cause was a skew-gear failure, which was a problem with the Merlin engine at the time. The skew-gear meshed with the magneto drive, and failure led to all ignition being instantly lost. Henshaw had already experienced such failures, the first being on another Spitfire he tested at Cosford, also at very low height. Being out in the country, Cosford was surrounded by suitable fields in which to make a forced landing. He chose a newly harrowed field and put the aircraft down in a satisfactory belly landing. This experience was followed by two more such failures which were both luckily within reach of Castle Bromwich and RAF Desford, so that he was able to make straightforward wheels down landings in both cases.
Over Willenhall he did not have such an easy decision. At such a low altitude the choice he had to make, to bale out or to try and put the aircraft down, had to be made almost instantly. He quickly decided to look for a place to force-land the Spitfire, and desperately scanned the soot-blackened landscape for a patch of greenery large enough.
There were factories and foundries packed around with streets of terraced houses and criss-crossed with power lines, canals and railways. Then he saw a stretch of greenery between two rows of houses. It was dotted with garden sheds and vegetable plots and there were a few trees on a patch of grass, but at the far end was a canal embankment, which he hoped would stop him if nothing else did.
As he turned his high speed glider, and lined it up, he had a few moments to consider his own mortality. He pulled the Sutton harness as tight as he could, and lowered the seat until he could hardly see out of the cockpit. Just before the Spitfire touched down the starboard wing stalled, and he suddenly remembered the open camera door. The aircraft swung to the right, and the starboard wing hit a large tree, which snapped it off at the root.
The remainder of the aircraft swung even more to the right and the propeller boss crashed into the kitchen wall of the end house. The propeller broke off and then the port wing dug into the earth, also snapping off. The fuselage crashed onwards, slowing up as it carved through the garden. The forward bulkhead hit something solid, which flung the fuselage up into the air, breaking it just behind the cockpit. Just before it turned over and buried Henshaw in a tangled mass of wreckage, it fell back with a final crash, and for the second time within a few minutes, a sudden silence descended.
Henshaw sat in the mangled wreckage for some time, his leg
s and thighs hurting badly. Blood was trickling down his hand and he suspected he had broken his arm. Blood was also trickling from his head and he closed his eyes to recover his senses, waiting for someone to cut him from the wreck. He could hear running water, but as he opened his eyes and his sense of smell took over, he realised with horror that it was actually petrol cascading over him, from the ruptured fuselage fuel tank.
Panic took over as the prospect of the wreck bursting into flames loomed large. He frantically undid his straps and pulled the canopy release lever. He scrambled hurriedly from the cockpit and was surprised to find himself standing shakily on his own two feet, apparently none the worse for wear apart from cuts and bruises. He heard weeping and shouting, and turned round to find an almost hysterical woman asking how many more poor souls were in the wreck. He reassured her that it was a single-seater, and that he himself was not too badly hurt.
50. The tree that caught the starboard wing of Henshaw’s Spitfire, and swung it into the house.
Just then a man came up, carrying that solution to all British problems in his shaking hands, a cup of tea. There was not much left in the cup by the time it reached Henshaw, but when he went to take a drink, he smelled the brandy with which it was laced, and had to decline, as he was a teetotaller. The man took the cup back, drank the tea himself, and set off to fetch another, unadulterated, cup. Henshaw discovered that he was near to Stubby Lane, Willenhall, and arranged to be picked up, arriving home to his wife somewhat later than he had expected.
In the nature of production testing, especially at a huge factory like Castle Bromwich, where thousands of aircraft were built, there were numerous forced landings; through the six years of the War, there were 127 in all, and these included Lancasters, Spitfires, Wellingtons and Seafires. Many of these were attributed to the Merlin’s skew-gear, but that problem was eventually solved.
Of course, the test pilots at Castle Bromwich sometimes suffered the alternative nightmare to a sudden silence, that is a sudden loud bang, and sometimes the decision they had to make leaned towards leaving the aircraft to its own devices.
Later in the same year as his forced landing in Willenhall, Henshaw was testing another Mk V, MJ190, over Cannock Chase. There was a great deal of ground fog, and he had climbed through a cloud layer from 8000 to 17,000 feet. He was in a power-dive, writing on his knee-pad, when everything seemed to burst. A cloud of oil, glycol and smoke poured forth from the engine, which began vibrating very badly.
It was clear that even if he managed to slow the aircraft enough to stop it falling apart around him, the poor visibility conditions would leave him little if any time to find a suitable landing area. Getting out was the logical option, and the knowledge that he was over the almost unpopulated area of Cannock Chase meant the aircraft was unlikely to crash onto any housing. Parts of the cowling were beginning to break away, but he still had time to scribble a note explaining his predicament on his knee-pad, in case he did not survive to bear witness to the problems.
51. The hole made by the Spitfire in the kitchen wall, and part of the fuselage.
He rapidly undid his straps, slid back the canopy and leaped from the cockpit. As he tumbled over and over he searched for the rip-cord, but even after finding it and feeling the sudden jerk as his canopy opened, his problems were not over. Looking up he could see that the parachute was damaged, and he had a long, agonisingly slow descent, with the further worry of having lost a boot. He finally landed in marshy ground, without damage to himself. After walking down a lane he came to a cottage where he phoned for a taxi to take him back to Castle Bromwich. Few of the episodes described in this book ended with such a simple return to civilisation for the pilots involved.
After the War Henshaw flew another Miles aircraft, a Messenger, out to South Africa. Here, he became a director of Miles Aircraft (Pty.) Ltd, but in 1948 returned to this country to run the family business.
52. The people of Willenhall had already paid for a Spitfire, so it was ironic that Alex Henshaw should return one to them, albeit in many pieces.
CHAPTER 14
Down in Greenland
During the Second World War, for the first time, aerial crossings of the North Atlantic became regular, daily events. Given the unpredictable, and unforgiving, weather conditions, it remained a hazardous venture. Over 500 aircrew lost their lives, most vanishing without trace. To ditch in the icy waters which the Ferry crews traversed was usually a death sentence. Even a forced landing on one of the land areas crossed on the northern route, over Greenland and Iceland, gave the crew little chance to survive. Nevertheless, the crew of an eastbound Douglas Boston did survive for fifteen days after a crash-landing on the Greenland ice cap.
The Atlantic Ferry Organisation (ATFERO) was initially a joint venture between Lord Beaverbrook’s Ministry of Aircraft Production and Canadian Pacific Railways’ Air Services Department. It was set up to fly North American-built aircraft to Great Britain, and eventually over 10,000 aircraft were flown over using several routes across the Atlantic. The scale of the operation was epic, especially when it is considered that before the War there had been only about 150 attempts to fly the Atlantic, a third of which had failed.
At first, the direct Gander to Great Britain route was flown by Hudsons with overload tanks in their bomb-bays, followed by Liberators and Catalinas, but for lighter twin-engined aircraft a new northern route was carved out. To supplement Gander a new starting airfield was created in the icy wilderness of Labrador at Goose Bay, and then staging airfields were built in Greenland and Iceland.
One of the types to be ferried extensively over this route was the Douglas Boston. One of these aircraft was BZ215, a Boston IIIA, one of 461 Bostons with BZ serials that were supplied to Great Britain under Lend Lease; though in the case of BZ215 ‘sent’ to Britain would be a better description, as it was never to arrive.
On 10 November 1942 BZ215 left Gander for Iceland, with an all-RCAF crew. Its pilot was Pilot Officer David Goodlet, from Simcoe, Ontario; the navigator, in the nose of the aircraft, was Pilot Officer Alfred Nash from Winnipeg; and the radio operator was Flight Sergeant Arthur Weaver from Toronto. They took off at 0.800 hrs, heading for Bluie West One, an airfield built at the southern tip of Greenland at Narssarsuak. After a couple of hours they ran into fog, and heavy cloud cover prevented Nash from taking any sun shots. Then the radio failed, so they were unable to get bearings. They flew at about 15,000 feet in case they drifted over the mountains of Greenland, hoping against hope that a break in the clouds would appear.
53. A Douglas Boston, from the same Lend-Lease batch of 461 aircraft with ‘BZ’ serials as Goodlet’s Boston. The upper hatch is open, showing where the dinghy and vital radio gear were sited.
With fuel down to about half an hour’s supply, Goodlet decided that they would have to try descending through the clouds while they still had engine power. They had no idea how low the cloud-base was or where they were. There was a serious danger that the cloud would stretch right down to the ground. They began descending cautiously through the cloud, not knowing whether they would simply crash into an ice-capped mountain at any moment.
They emerged from beneath the cloud at about 3800 feet and found themselves flying over a Greenland plateau between a range of mountains. They estimated that the coast was about 15 miles away, but they would have to climb back through the clouds to clear the mountains. That would mean making another blind descent, with no certainty that they would find anywhere more suitable to land. From the air the snow-covered ground beneath them looked flat enough, and they decided to try a wheels-up landing while they could. A wheels-down landing in a nosewheel aircraft was quite out of the question.
Anxious to make a landing while he still had some engine power to help him, Goodlet brought the Boston in for a landing straight away. He put it down on the three foot deep snow as gently as he could, and hoped to avoid any hidden crevasses. In the nose Alfred Nash felt horribly exposed, surrounded as he was by Perspex, and c
ertain to arrive first at any obstacle to their plans.
As the Boston touched down Goodlet cut the switches, and the aircraft slid to a halt in a cloud of snow, largely in one piece. They were all able to exit the aircraft through upper hatches, from their three locations. Once they were certain that the aircraft was not going to burst into flames, they gathered together in the rear fuselage; surviving outside was out of the question. The weather was bitterly cold with the temperature around -40°F and a Force 8 gale blowing. They stuffed strips of parachute in the various cracks in the fuselage, and wrapped more of it them around themselves, but still the cold ate down to their bones.
They spent long periods lying on top of one another for the shared body heat, taking it in turns to be the one in the middle. At regular intervals they got up and kicked the skin of the aircraft to keep the circulation going in their feet.
Despite the cold, Weaver spent some time working on the radio transmitter. The radio racks were in the upper fuselage underneath a sideways folding hatch. He managed to get it going, and began transmitting an SOS. Ferry Command had assumed the aircraft lost when it became overdue, but two days later, on 12 May, Weaver’s SOS was picked up. However, a search could not be made for several days because of the appalling weather conditions prevailing.
